“Every page of Paradise Rot contains something in it that burrows deep inside you. Much like Hval’s musical output, the book is almost uncomfortably intimate, the kind of penetrating encounter that will make you uncontrollably shudder as your body is plunged into the sensory world that Hval has created. It’s an uncanny and yet deeply moving reading experience, one that Hval uses to explore the complexities of queer desire and human enmeshment in our physical surroundings.”
Nylon
“All I can say is with no electricity I read Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval in the dark tonight by flashlight, in one go. It will not let go of you. A surreal *and* realist gem of sensation and detail and character. Beautiful and boldly written”
Jeff VanderMeer, author of Annihilation
“Hval is an expert at creating and sustaining atmospherics across genres, and Paradise Rot is no exception. Paradise Rot is an odd microcosm inside an ordinary world … It is, in many ways, a novel about finding and then choosing a self; it also shows the pull of unexpected queer desire and the dismantling of boundaries that draw requires. But most of all, in the way that a microscope reveals an unsettling truth about the familiar (that it’s teeming with life you never expected), Paradise Rot is hard to forget.”
Pitchfork, US
“Hval’s curiosity is more than simple pleasure in perversity: It’s meant to defile the idea of women’s bodies as pristine and plush … and reshape it into something more dreadfully real. Maybe more revolutionary than that transfiguration is her disemboweling of desire itself, unraveling it to its fearsome, primal state, and exploring the strangeness of how sexuality can alienate one from oneself; how feelings of mistrust come about when desire is new, queer and unreliable.”
NPR, US
“Strange and lyrical … Hval’s writing is surreal and rich with the grotesque banalities of human existence.”
Publishers Weekly
“You’ll have a hard time finding stranger coming-of-age novel than Hval’s [Paradise Rot], which combines ghost story, cannibalistic fantasy and doppelgänger motif with a classic tale of first love.”
Politiken, Denmark
